Expensive Subway Tunneling

This is VERY expensive. A lot of new subway lines could be built at the same cost.

> $3.5 billion/mile is a lot to pay for new track!That's mostly paying for the tunnels, not the track. It shouldn't cost nearly that much, but it's not surprising that it isn't cheap either: the tunnels are being constructed under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the world, and the resulting stations are significantly larger than others in the system.And note: if you think that's expensive, you won't believe what it costs to repair

Don't subways and other rail projects routinely cost a billion dollars?https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

What's interesting is dozens of message on HackerNews and nobody links to any type of studies or evaluation of Elon's work, just repeating is selling point that because the tunnel is smaller, it will be cheaper. Public transportation and cost is a very well studied topic internationally (outside the US) and we can't just assume that for a fact. Actually, boring is actually not the most expensive part of building a subway. Even this idea of saving 10x the amount of money, actually

Since the first one cost about 47 million, it seems reasonable to guess the others will cost some multiple of that. The opportunity cost of several hundred million dollars seems... bad? Just have a subway!

Absolutely true: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/g...

Maybe the price? My city recently built an overpass over a single rail track that cost the same amount - $50 million. A tunnel like this would probably be a 10x cost run by most companies.

Just 850 million euros of public money to build a mile and a half long tunnel under downtown! (Under a billion euros total.) A bi-level tunnel, with separate express and local levels, and four lanes on each level.By contrast, the SR99 tunnel in Seattle was about 1/3 longer, cost $3-4 billion, depending on how lawsuits shake out, and has half the capacity (two levels with two lanes each). The Big Dig in Boston was the same length, and cost 22 times as much.In timely news (anothe

Tunneling in the US is really expensive but many projects have been done for a billion per mile (China is like $100 million per mile). The Big Dig is the highest priced tunnel ever done and not the expected cost of tunneling. If we could do $100 million per mile from San Francisco to Palo Alto (~45 miles), that is $4.5 billion. Charge the $20 each and make ~$1 billion a year. This would be a no brainer. Even at $1 billion a mile and $45 billion total it would almost make sense financially in the

If you actually look into construction projects, including extremely expensive American ones, tunnel boring is not a significant cost.The actual cost comes in station digging; stations need to be high throughput and extremely reliable, which favors complexes with a large footprint and thus more required property taking, usually in dense urban areas that require complicated engineering. For highway tunnels the similar cost factor are onramps and offramps; if you want a ramp to be safe and effi